Entertainment

Beacon Now Optional: Reports of Facebook’s Demise Greatly Exaggerated

I’m often reminded of the fact that I don’t think about the Web in the same way most of my friends do. While we in the blog world have been droning on endlessly about every twist and turn in the Facebook Beacon saga, I had a hunch that most “regular” users of the site aren’t even aware of the new advertising program. Low and behold, a “sponsored poll” that Valleywag uncovered yesterday:

According to the poll, which ran in the tech-heavy San Francisco network, 67 percent of users haven’t even heard of Facebook Beacon. What does this mean? Most people still login primarily to check messages, pokes, and wall posts, and then get on with their day, the majority of which isn’t spent reading RSS feeds. By the time Facebook makes changes based on the beating they are taking from bloggers, most users probably won’t have ever even noticed there was a Beacon-related privacy problem to begin with.

Meanwhile, what do the numbers say? According to some new data from Compete.com this morning, Facebook traffic was up 20 percent month-over-month:

Listen, Facebook needs to make changes to Beacon. Users, both techie and not, don’t get it and don’t like it. But it's hardly something that keeps the vast majority of users awake at night, and not something that’s going to send Facebook into a tailspin if they don’t change it within the next 24 hours.

Update (8:35am PST): Alas, as I go back to check my RSS feeds after making this post, Mark Z has apologized for Beacon and announced a new feature to turn off Beacon completely. Facebook is certainly not dying anytime soon.

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